“Smarts, life satisfaction, income and education levels – and other measures of success – were correlated with increased connectivity between certain areas of the brain while at rest.”

those with a connectome at one end of scale score highly on measures typically deemed to be positive, such as vocabulary, memory, life satisfaction, income and years of education– those at the other end of the scale were found to exhibit high scores for traits typically considered negative, such as anger, rule-breaking, substance use and poor sleep quality.

The researchers point out that their results resemble what psychologists refer to as the ‘general intelligence g-factor’: a variable first proposed in 1904 that’s sometimes used to summarize a person’s abilities at different cognitive tasks. While the new results include many real-life measures not included in the g-factor — such as income and life satisfaction, for instance — those such as memory, pattern recognition and reading ability are strongly mirrored.